Movie Review: The Guilty

Gatekeeping English-language remakes of foreign films is one of the more time-honored practices in cinephile culture. To be fair, there have been a number of instances where American studios have come in and completely butchered some excellent movies (Oldboy, Martyrs, The Eye) from overseas, but automatically writing something off because somebody decided to translate a movie into another language is the hardcore movie fan equivalent of comic book fans complaining whenever a movie adaptation decides to stray from the source material. The 2018 Danish thriller The Guilty is the latest film to head down this tricky path and through a combination of it being a contained, relatively straightforward thriller that translates well to American filmmaking sensibilities and having the right people (Antoine Fuqua, Nic Pizzolatto, Jake Gyllenhaal) involved with the adaptation, the US version ends up being a huge success.

In a move that was smart considering how suspenseful, claustrophobic and well-executed the Danish version was, The Guilty makes no changes to the material outside of some minor character/setting details. The film plays out over the course of one night at a Los Angeles Police 911 call center. Protagonist Joe Baylor (Gyllenhaal) is an officer that's been demoted from active duty to night shift phone operator after being involved in an undisclosed incident eight months earlier. On the night before he's due to appear in court for a hearing involving said incident, he receives a call from a distressed woman named Emily Lighton (Riley Keough) who says she's been abducted and is traveling down the highway in a white van. Baylor attempts to calm her down and extract more information about her location, but gets disconnected before he can get the specific information he needs to pass along to his peers on the street to launch a proper search. As the night progresses, Baylor becomes more and more consumed with tracking down Emily's captor and before long, the situation takes a series of unexpected turns that shake him to his core and force him to finally reckon with his own demons.

What distinguishes The Guilty from its source material is the work of Gyllenhaal, Keough and Fuqua. Gyllenhaal turns in his best performance since Nightcrawler by highlighting the arrogance and anger that Baylor uses to obscure the desperate, broken man he really is, Keough provides some really powerful voice acting that fuels several of the most effective moments of the film and Fuqua does a great job of further emphasizing the police brutality subtext (it is set in America after all...) without taking away from the suffocating, slowly escalating tension that made the original standout. Their efforts are enough to not only honor the source material, but give this version its own raw, urgent emotional identity that elevates it above it. Making an English language remake that actually improves upon the original is a difficult feat that isn't pulled off with any significant degree of regularity and everybody involved with this project should take a tremendous amount of pride in what they were able to accomplish here.         

Grade: B+